Developing a metric for frontline worker collaboration in India's Integrated Child Development Services: A step toward measuring the "missing middle" of multi-sectoral collaboration

Multi-sectoral collaboration (MSC) is widely recognized as a critical aspect of policies, programs, and interventions to address complex public health issues, yet it tends to be undertheorized and difficult to measure. Limited understanding of the intermediate steps linking MSC formation to intended health outcomes leaves a substantial knowledge gap about the types of strategies that may be most effective in making such collaborations successful. This dissertation takes a step toward filling in this “missing middle” of MSC by developing and testing a scale-based instrument to assess collaboration between the frontline workers of one of India’s largest and most widely known MSCs: the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. Informed by Emerson’s & Nabatchi’s Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance, the study follows a mixed methods design for instrument development and construct validation, including a quantitative strand (Paper 1) to develop the 18-item, Likert-type scale and test its psychometric properties; a qualitative strand (Paper 2) to identify key collaboration factors among the frontline workers through in-depth interviews (IDIs) and inductive thematic analysis of transcripts; and a mixed analysis (Paper 3) triangulating the quantitative and qualitative findings to further assess the construct and content validity of the scale. Embedded within a parent study conducted in two districts of Uttar Pradesh, India, data collection involved field testing of the scale in Hindi with frontline workers in 346 villages and in-depth interviews with those workers in six purposively sampled villages. Results provide clear evidence supporting the internal consistency and validity of the frontline worker collaboration scale in the study context and serve as a proof of concept for possible adaptation of the scale elsewhere. Recommendations for scale refinement are provided, including the development and testing of two additional scale items (flexibility and locus of control). The frontline worker collaboration scale may be useful for ICDS managers as the Indian Government redoubles its efforts to strengthen and monitor MSC, or “convergence”, in the scheme, while identified collaboration factors may have implications for ICDS program management, training, and hiring. Finally, the study’s design introduces a useful adaptation of an existing mixed methods instrument development framework

Measuring resilience is not enough; we must apply the research. Researchers and practitioners need a common language to make this happen.

This article is contributed by a practitioner in the area of country-level health systems strengthening who also has a background in resilience research. The intent of the article is to offer constructive reflection on the disconnect between the insights of resilience research and the application of those insights through development assistance. The primary reason for the existence of this communication block is that resilience research findings are not often translated in a format that is useful to those implementing resilience promotion projects. As a result, implementers do not usually review relevant research to guide their interventions. Resilience researchers and practitioners need a common language, one that arises from effective community engagement

Resilience in Post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana: A Preliminary Study

Background: Much scholarly and practitioner attention to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, Louisiana has focused on the failures of government disaster prevention and management at all levels, often overlooking the human strength and resourcefulness observed in individuals and groups among the worst-affected communities. Objectives: This preliminary study sought to investigate human resilience in the city of New Orleans, State of Louisiana, eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Mississippi delta region. Methods: The Sense of Coherence scale, short form (SOC-13) was administered to a sample of 41 residents of Lower Ninth Ward and adjacent Wards who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina but were either living in or visiting their home area during March 2007. Study participants were recruited through the local branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a nation-wide grassroots organization whose mission is to promote the housing rights of low and moderate-income individuals and families across the USA and in several other countries. Results: Those who had returned to their homes had significantly higher SOC scores compared to those who were still displaced (p<0.001). Among the latter, those who were members of ACORN scored significantly higher than non-members (pp<0.005), and their SOC-13 scores were not significantly different from the scores of study participants who had returned home (including both members and non-members of ACORN). Conclusions: The findings of this preliminary study concur with previous reports in the literature on the deleterious impact of displacement on individual and collective resilience to disasters. Relevant insight gleaned from the qualitative data gathered during the course of administering the SOC-13 scale compensate for the limitations of the small sample size as they draw attention to the importance of the study participants&apos; sources of social support. Possible avenues for further research are outlined

Leadership in Scholarship: A Machine Learning Based Investigation of Editors' Influence on Textual Structure

Academic journals disseminate new knowledge, and editors of prominent journals are in a position to affect the direction and composition of research. Using machine learning procedures, we measure the influence of editors of the American Economic Review (AER) on the relative topic structure of papers published in the AER and other top general interest journals. We apply the topic analysis apparatus to the corpus of all publications in the Top 5 journals in Economics between 1976 and 2013, and also to the publications of the AER's editors during the same period. This enables us to observe the changes occurring over time in the relative frequency of topics covered by the AER and other leading general interest journals over time. We .nd that the assignment of a new editor tends to coincide with a change of topics in the AER in favour of a new editor's topics which can not be explained away by shifts in overall research trends that may be observed in other leading general interest journals